Texture mapping was introduced about three decades ago as a way to add surface detail without adding geometry. Texture-mapped polygons have since become the basic primitives of the standard graphics pipeline. Unfortunately, texture-mapped surfaces have a distinctive look that sets them apart from reality. For example, they cannot accurately respond to changes in illumination and viewpoint.
Real-world surfaces are usually not smooth; instead, they are covered with textures that arise from both spatially-variant reflectance and fine-scale geometry details that are often termed “mesostructures”. Real surfaces also exhibit imperfections (e.g., dirt, cracks, and scratches) that typically result from relatively complicated physical processes. Even three decades later, capturing these surface characteristics is a challenging goal for computer graphics.
Accordingly, there is a need for schemes, mechanisms, techniques, etc. that can efficiently and/or conveniently enable computer graphics to better capture spatially-variant reflectance and/or fine-scale geometric mesostructures.